Just Nuts?

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 8/30/2006

Terrorism: What would possess a Muslim motorist to drive around San Francisco Bay Area streets in his SUV and deliberately run over pedestrians, including kids? Insanity, shrugs the mainstream media.

Omeed Aziz Popal was taken into custody Tuesday after a hit-and-run spree that terrorized pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists for a full hour, killing one and injuring 14. The news treated the bloody rampage like a random act of violence.

Those in the media who didn't brush it off as an "inexplicable tragedy" before moving on to the next story focused on the alleged mental illness and not the religion of suspect Popal, a native of Afghanistan. His lawyer claims he'd been treated for a nervous breakdown. A cousin offered that Popal, who'd returned two weeks earlier from Afghanistan, might have been stressed over an arranged marriage.

But police, who say victims were hit intentionally and methodically in a dozen different locations throughout the area, aren't buying it.

The clean-cut 29-year-old seemed calm, coherent and unrepentant when they pulled him from his black Honda SUV. It was as he was being arrested that a woman heard Popal say "I'm a terrorist," a statement that, as of Wednesday afternoon, only KTVU in San Francisco was reporting.

Interestingly, one of the locations, a few blocks from where the rampage ended, was the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, a detail that slipped the big media. Two of the victims were struck there.

It's significant because last month a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan went on a shooting rampage at a Seattle Jewish center. After coldly and deliberately shooting six women there, suspect Naveed Haq announced, "I'm a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel."

Again, the media ignored Haq's stated religious motive and focused instead on his history of mental illness. Consensus: No Islamic terrorism here, just the random violent act of a crazy man.

But crazy men don't take premeditative steps such as looking up the nearest Jewish center on the Internet and traveling all the way from central Washington state to hit their target.

The San Francisco attack is also reminiscent of the hit-and-run rampage last spring at the University of North Carolina in which another angry Muslim lashed out at infidels by hitting nine people with a big SUV he'd rented for the occasion.

Iranian-born Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar told the 911 dispatcher that he was attempting to "punish the government of the United States for its actions around the world." He told the judge he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah." The media played that unavoidable part of the story down.

Same with other freelance terrorists. The Beltway snipers were Muslim converts who admired the 9-11 hijackers. They said their goal was to "terrorize" Washington. One wrote in his diary: "Islam. We will resist. We will conquer." Some news outlets couldn't bring themselves to say the leader's legally changed Muslim name, John Muhammad, using instead his previous name John Allen Williams.

And remember the Muslim immigrant from Egypt who fatally shot two at Israel's El Al ticket counter at LAX? He deliberately looked for Jews to kill, yet the media wouldn't call it a terrorist attack.

War is no time for apologetics. In their tired effort to claim the mantle of tolerance, the media only disserve Americans by continuing to sugarcoat the ugly truth about the enemy.